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Public Theater’s Dreamer in Chief

Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater, at the Delacorte Theater, where he is directing Hamlet, for Shakespeare in the Park.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

OSKAR EUSTIS was bleeding. He walked into the Noho Star restaurant in the East Village for an 8:30 a.m. interview, on time and smiling, and with a seeping gash over his right eye that had turned half his face and both forearms red. Bicycle accident on the way over, he explained, before excusing himself to go to the restroom.

When he returned, the gash was still oozing generously and his hands were still peppered with gravel and dried blood. But he was currently in the middle of rehearsals for “Hamlet,” the first of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park productions this summer and the only play he is directing this season; rescheduling would have been a near impossibility. And there was something, some glimmer in his eye, that made you suspect he got a kick out of it.

The bearish and engaging Mr. Eustis, 49, is finishing his third season as artistic director of the Public, one of the most demanding jobs in the theater universe. The theater’s mission, as defined by its founder, Joseph Papp, is nothing less than “a theater for all New Yorkers.” For Papp that meant an institution that was as accessible to as many as possible, that engaged directly with the social and political issues of the day and that reflected the wide cultural, ethnic and economic diversity of New York on its stages and in its audiences.

But in the 54 years since that mission was declared, it has gone from being a radical manifesto to standard operating procedure in the nonprofit New York theater world, at least in a somewhat watered-down form: cheap-ticket programs abound, major institutional theaters are adding black-box theaters for new works, and minority casting has become the norm.

None of this has diluted the importance of the Public Theater, Mr. Eustis said. “You get these different institutions that do different pieces of what the Public is supposed to do,” he explained. “But the Public is the only place that puts all of them together.”

In interviews with people in the theater industry inside and outside the Public — many of whom declined to speak for attribution because in the small world of theater there is a common fear of jeopardizing future opportunities — there was near-unanimous praise for Mr. Eustis’s energy and his stated goals. Agreement was less universal, though, on how successful he had been in acting on these goals, with complaints that his promises have fallen short both in dealings with individual artists and in pursuing the Public’s mission at large.

Granted, it is impossible to do the job perfectly, and no one has. When Mr. Eustis came to the Public in 2005, it had just managed to steer itself out of a crisis. An economic downturn combined with a couple of bad bets on Broadway highlighted the theater’s deep-seated and nearly fatal administrative weaknesses.

These problems had been allowed to fester for years, during which the nearly $50 million the Public took in from its Broadway transfer of “A Chorus Line,” gave it no pressing reason to put its finances in order. That crisis, which hit hardest in 2001, was due in large part to decisions made by the hyperkinetic George C. Wolfe, who ran the Public from 1993 to 2005. But it was also because of Mr. Wolfe that the Public Theater still managed to enjoy a healthy decade even after “A Chorus Line” closed in 1990.

Mr. Wolfe almost single-handedly brought the theater out of the fiscal doldrums he had found it in, eliminating a budget deficit and almost quintupling the endowment that remained after Papp’s death in 1991 and JoAnne Akalaitis’s subsequent 20-month tenure as artistic director. Mr. Wolfe also aligned the Public with his stated vision of “a mongrel American theater,” championing new playwrights and turning the Public into what was probably the most racially diverse theater in the country. Naysayers liked to complain that he ran the Public as a production company for his own shows, but few disputed that in the mid-1990s the theater was a success.

As often happens, however, bust followed boom.

In the middle of Mr. Wolfe’s tenure two of his several Broadway transfers, “The Wild Party” and “On the Town,” flopped badly, losing $14 million of the Public’s money just as the country headed into a recession.

With the endowment plunging and deficits increasing, Mr. Wolfe and his staff cut the theater’s annual summer Shakespeare in the Park two-show season down to one and laid off a fifth of the staff.

At the same time the traditionally complacent trustees stepped up, bringing in an executive director to take control of fiscal issues so Mr. Wolfe could focus on artistic matters. After the first hire lasted less than a year, in 2002 the board hired Mara Manus, a program officer for economic development at the Ford Foundation.

“I walked into what I considered a lot of opportunity,” Ms. Manus said diplomatically, “to address an organization whose art was superb and whose systems and structures needed work.” She began by modernizing the marketing, development and communications departments, bringing the Public in line with other major theaters that never had the luxury of a “Chorus Line” trust fund.

All along, Mr. Eustis had his eye on the Public. As a teenage actor he auditioned for Papp, shortly after leaving Minnesota, where he had grown up.

At the Eureka Theater Company in San Francisco in the 1980s he commissioned Tony Kushner to write “Angels in America,” which he later directed as associate artistic director at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Having established a reputation for dedication to new work that drew comparisons to Papp, dramaturgical strengths that outshone his directing abilities and his brash leftist politics, he was hired in 1994 by Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I. Mr. Eustis turned Trinity from a money loser into a healthy regional theater known both for new works and traditional musicals like Mr. Eustis’s own production of “The Music Man.”

In a Providence Journal-Bulletin interview at the time Mr. Eustis said there was no other theater in the country he would rather be associated with than Trinity — “with the possible exception of the Public Theater in New York.” Apparently meaning it, he later turned down offers for the top jobs at the Yale Repertory Theater and the Mark Taper.

In his appearance before the board of the Public after Mr. Wolfe announced he would retire in 2005, Mr. Eustis was not shy about his ambitions for the theater: new initiatives to bring in playwrights and directors, programs for the Shakespeare component of the Public’s mission and the pursuit of controversial, politically engaged work.

Photo

From near left, Oskar Eustis, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jay O. Sanders and Margaret Colin rehearsing Hamlet.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

His most radical — and Pappian — idea was a proposal to run the Public on the model of the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where all seats are free except for those — usually around 30 percent — that are purchased by corporate and individual sponsors. While the board members are still far from acting on the free-ticket idea, they were attracted by Mr. Eustis’s proposals, his relationships with major American playwrights like Mr. Kushner and his enthusiasm for the Public’s original mission.

“He had a similar kind of approach to the theater that kind of reminded me of Joe’s,” said Papp’s widow, Gail Merrifield Papp.

So they hired him.

He immediately went into action, setting up a program to develop young writers that included stipends, master classes and the promise of a reading at the Public. In keeping with his vision of the theater as a “big tent,” he began bringing in existing showcases for new work like the Under The Radar festival — organized by the downtown impresario Mark Russell, who had been one of the candidates for the artistic directorship — and the Summer Play Festival. He put on contemporary, political plays like “Stuff Happens” and “In Darfur” at the Delacorte Theater, a first. The Public is now in the process of creating a salaried residency, with benefits, for an established playwright; a program to offer free Shakespeare in all five New York City boroughs; and a training course for classical acting.

“There were days when I walked into the lobby, and there were three or four other shows going up that night,” said Richard Nelson, whose play “Conversations in Tusculum” ran at the theater this spring. “You’d meet people and say: ‘Oh, look, there’s so-and-so. What show are you seeing?’ ”

But there is only so much you can do, even at a Public that is now stabilized and humming along with a $20 million budget. Even for Mr. Eustis, whose driving vision appears at times to boil down to one word: more.

Early on, one board member, Ken Auletta, cautioned Mr. Eustis about acting too much like the Music Man, that is, overselling every work in the season. (He’s become much better about it, Mr. Auletta said.)

That proselytizing impulse has left many playwrights and theatrical agents around the city grumbling about a perceived gap between his zeal and his follow-through. It isn’t entirely or even mostly Mr. Eustis’s fault that some of his plans cannot be realized, say those who complained of this tendency. It’s just that reality tends to follow the bouts of exuberance.

“For enthusiasm, intelligence and taste he is nearly without peer,” one theatrical agent, Mark Christian Subias, wrote in an e-mail message. “However, I think his unmeasured ebullience toward artists whom he admires, often combined with his inability to commit to them; and the continued financial constraints he’s faced at the Public, have left a number of artists feeling marginalized and/or disappointed.”

Mr. Eustis said he had been learning. “How do you say yes in a way that is realistic, and how do you say no when you need to say no, and how do you get the resources to say yes when you want to?” he asked. “There’s a mismatch of what the Public should ideally be doing, what I’d like to be able to do and the resources we have to do it.”

A more common grievance, from agents, producers and artists, was that it was almost impossible to get in touch with Mr. Eustis at all. This is particularly frustrating for young, less mainstream writers, given some of the names on the Public’s main stages recently.

In his past three seasons Mr. Eustis has presented newcomers like Rinne Groff (“The Ruby Sunrise,” which he directed at the Public and at Trinity), Daniel Beaty (“Emergence-See!”) and Tarell Alvin McCraney (“The Brothers Size”), first put on as part of the Under the Radar festival.

But there has been a preponderance of pedigree: beyond Mr. McCraney the works presented last season were by Sam Shepard, Caryl Churchill, David Henry Hwang, the Wooster Group and Mr. Nelson. Even the schedule of the Public Lab, a new program described as “an adventurous series presenting vital new plays in bare-bones productions,” is dotted with familiar names like the Civilians and Adrienne Kennedy, artists who would not seem to have difficulties finding other theaters to put on their work.

“If the Civilians don’t really need you, you’re not doing your job,” said John Clancy, a founder and former artistic director of the New York International Fringe Festival. Mr. Eustis explained that this past season had been purposely designed to reconnect with some of the major artists who had worked at the Public in the past, and that some of the plays he had put on are of the politically confrontational variety that other theaters shy away from. More to the point, he said, new and exciting work is flourishing in the emerging writers group, the Public Lab series, the resident LAByrinth theater company, the Under the Radar festival and Joe’s Pub, a cabaret-performance space.

A dramaturge at heart, Mr. Eustis said some of the works, like the Civilians’ “Paris Commune” at the Public Lab, needed further development and could possibly move into the main stage season when they were ready. He pointed as an example to Stew’s “Passing Strange,” which Mr. Wolfe initially commissioned from Stew’s act at Joe’s Pub, but which Mr. Eustis guided through the three-year development process. That led to a slot in the Public’s season; the production then transferred to Broadway, where it has been nominated for seven Tony Awards.

Mr. Eustis repeatedly described his job as that of an architect, designing structures that will support themselves no matter who is running the theater. Balancing all these new programs with the need to keep the Public running in the black will be a tricky job for whoever replaces Ms. Manus, who is leaving in August. “We are right now functioning at a much, much higher level of production than the organization has been at for a long time, and ensuring that the structures are in place to support that is the main focus,” Ms. Manus said, sounding a cautionary note. But Mr. Eustis, who encouraged the board to start developing a long-range plan, said nothing guaranteed a theater’s long-term health better than establishing these structures.

“I’ve spent my life in institutional theaters,” he said. “I feel like my job is to take these missions and make sure they have a long life.” While the situation at Trinity was different in some ways, the principle is the same at the Public, he said.

“The thesis in hiring me has to be that we can make a stable organization that is just as risky and cutting edge artistically as it’s always been. You don’t need a chaotic organization in order to produce cutting-edge, experimental, daring, dangerous work.”

He smiled, the blood still congealing in his eyelashes. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Correction: June 15, 2008

An article last Sunday about Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, misstated the position that his colleague Mara Manus held while at the Ford Foundation. She was a program officer for economic development, not a fund-raiser.